Echoes
by AWildeRomantic
Summary: They both needed something to fill the emptiness of the years. Somewhere deep down Helen was glad that he had come to her, and glad the others would never know. Set just after the pilot.


The first time she saw him he was a ghost at the end of the hallway. On the way up to her room for the night, Helen simply looked up and there he was, pale face glowing in the moonlight, the rest of him seeming to blend into the shadows. He glanced to her for a moment, then was gone and the hall existed as it had before, as though he had never been there. It wasn't the first time she doubted her own sanity.

Helen's room was the master suite, spacious, filled with tall bookshelves, antiquities and a huge canopy bed centered along one wall. The drapes were drawn over the lower half of the windows, but from the top beams of pale moonlight fell in across the paintings on the wall with their gilded frames, the bed where Helen lay asleep, the thick carpeting, and John Druitt standing in the middle of it all, by a small wooden table where a bowl of fruit sat, perfectly arraigned. Absently he reached down and lifted an apple from the top, holding it to his nose and inhaling slightly as though relishing in the life that was still remembered beneath the peel.

Placing it back again, he strode towards the bed, careful to not block the beam of light that fell across Helen's face, lest he wake her prematurely. His eyes traveled over her form; her dark hair fanned out on the pillow – how different she looked, as he could remember when those loose curls were the color of late autumn wheat – her face turned to the side, lips parted, chest rising and falling softly beneath the coverlet. One slender hand lay next to her head on the pillow and in her sleep her fingers twitched ever so slightly, as though she was unlocking some great scientific mystery hidden beneath the surface of one of her abnormals.

There was the faint swish of fabric as Druitt let his jacket slide to the floor. His face held an expression of silent observation, of longing, of loss, a look he would never show if he thought someone else might see. Moving to the side of the bed, he kept his gaze focused on Helen. She slept on, oblivious to the tall form now standing over her. In a series of slow, careful movements he sat on the edge of the bed, eyeing the sleeping woman carefully and when she didn't wake he stretched out beside her, a longing sigh escaping his lips.

Only when he was pressed up behind her, one arm around her waist did he allow himself to speak. "Helen," he breathed against the back of her neck.

Her eyes flew open but she didn't move, nor did she make a sound. Something within Helen remembered this feeling, though she hadn't awoken this way in over a century.

"My…Helen…" Druitt nuzzled her hair, inhaling deeply, his hand flattening against her stomach, resisting the urge to slip under the covers to seek her bare skin.

"John." Helen forced herself to remain still despite the pounding of her heart. "What are you doing…here?" She had almost made it sound normal that her former fiancée, her former lover had slipped into her bed while she slept. She rolled over to face him and the stark moon-shadows caused his eyes to appear even more hooded than normal, his face more skeletal.

"You're shivering," he murmured, his deep voice rumbling through the soft darkness of the room. "You're not…cold, are you, my love?"

Helen stared at him and tried to scoot away but his arm was still around her waist, hand now on her back, keeping her close. "You frighten me, John," she whispered, moving one hand from beneath the covers to grasp his arm.

He laughed at that and moved suddenly, but before Helen could move herself he was over her, arms braced on the pillow on either side of her head, legs beside hers, body hovering above her. He stared down, gaze intense. "But I would never harm you. Even if I wanted to I could not." He leaned down to let his lips graze over her cheek. "I have missed you, my dear, sweet Helen."

"Don't do this, John. Get off of me." She didn't want to think about how he had gotten in here. She didn't want to think about how those hands that were now so close to her had killed so many innocent people. The blood was gone from them, but it was still there, and she knew his silver dagger couldn't be too far away.

He tugged the blanket down, leaving her shivering in her thin nightgown. Helen watched as he sat back for a moment and she sat up as well, leaning against the headboard. When she attempted to draw her knees to her chest he put his hands on her legs, forcing them down as he leaned in closer to her. The intense look he gave her was the same one a predator would give its prey, but Helen knew better.

She anticipated the kiss seconds before it came, seconds before his lips crashed against hers and all the heat she thought was gone forever came rushing back. One of Druitt's hands tangled roughly in her hair and Helen found her own hands clutching at the front of his shirt as unbidden and perhaps unwanted arousal flooded her. This wasn't her John. This wasn't the same man who had made love to her the night her daughter was conceived. That man was lost beneath the dark and the cold.

But he was still there, somewhere.

"No!" She broke the kiss and stared at him, breathing heavily, unshed tears glinting behind her eyes.

He looked angry, his face starting to twist into that expression of rage she was only all too familiar with. "Let me have this, Helen! Let me have this one night of solace before I slip back into the shadows once again!"

"Not until you let me help you. I can fix this, John, if you just-"

A reflex, perhaps. His hand came up and caught her throat, roughly at first then, as though realizing what he was doing, his grip loosened and he stroked her smooth skin lightly. "A lesson you must learn, Helen, you cannot fix everything. Now let me have this."

"You need to be cured, John, not just given a few hours comfort!"

"_Oh, you should not rest between the elements of air and earth but you should pity me_," Druitt intoned mockingly, expression not softening for even the briefest moment. "No, Helen! You will not pity me! You cannot cure me but you can still give me this if my well being is such a concern to you!"

"Shhh!" Helen dared to bring one hand up and lay it over his lips.

"And what?" He murmured against her fingers. "Are you afraid I will wake _our_ daughter? That she will enter and wonder why her mother is in bed with the man who not days ago tried to kill her? Are you afraid of what your naive little protégé or that rather hideous butler of yours will think?"

Helen let her hand fall, for now it wasn't Druitt that frightened her. It was herself. Her own mind. Those feelings rising within her, despite it all, despite the deaths, all those empty years, the fear that he would come to take from her what he still insisted she had taken from him. Everything. All of it.

"I want more than just your blood this time, Helen." His voice was low again, a whisper, slipping through the air to her, drawing her close until their lips were touching in a tentative kiss.

Helen forgot herself. He pulled away for a moment and she grabbed him by the belt of all things to pull him back, her hands fumbling with the thick buckle in a way that was so desperate it almost embarrassed her. Not quite though, and Druitt's soft chuckle turned to a slow intake of breath as she pressed her fingers to him, looking up into his eyes because she had all but forgotten that she could do these things to him. She had all but forgotten that she actually wanted to do these things to him, after spending so many years convincing herself that she didn't.

He caught her jaw in one hand, drawing her closer for a kiss and this time she responded eagerly, until Druitt sat back with a frustrated grunt, flinging his shirt off while Helen watched, grabbing her waist, drawing her close as his hands sought the quickest way to remove her nightgown, over her head, and he could finally see her for the first time in over a century. His beautiful, perfect Helen, even after all these years.

Druitt slid his hand down to cup the soft curve of her breast and she inhaled sharply, arching into his touch and tilting her head back so that her pale throat was tantalizingly exposed to him. He bent to kiss it, molding his body to hers so that the evidence of his own arousal was made quite apparent to her. She pressed her hips against his, bending her knee and sliding her foot up the back of one trousered leg, reminding him that there was a final boundary to cross.

And he crossed it without hesitation. Druitt sat back and undid the catch of his trousers, kicking both them and his undergarments out of sight and out of mind before returning to her. Helen's eyes were wide and deep in the moonlight, her hair a dark cascade around her shoulders, such a contrast to her pale skin. And even as she spread her legs to cradle him more intimately against her, he could do nothing but marvel at her beauty.

"So lovely, so perfect," he whispered, turning, bracing one arm against the mattress and wrapping the other about her. "And mine for all eternity."

"John…" the soft whisper of his name became a throaty moan as he thrust his hips against hers.

And, oh, after all these decades did it felt so wonderful to finally fill her! Druitt pressed his open mouth to her throat, groaning as his body sought its rhythm with hers, his Helen, the woman that should have been in his bed and his heart from oh-so-long ago. The ache in his groin was finally relieved as he moved against her, with her, in and out, reminding him how wonderful it was to be human and to feel human.

His cries were muffled by her skin, hers by the backs of her fingers as she turned her head, pressing her hand to her mouth. Druitt moved his hand from behind her to her side, then up to squeeze her breast, urging her closer and closer to the edge as he had always done since the day they met.

"Helen-!" The cry ripped out of his chest as he came, his body shuddering against hers, fingers digging into the mattress and her soft flesh. A few breathless, suspended moments and her orgasm broke over her, her body tightening around him, clenching at him, legs and hands and…a sob broke from Helen's lips, unrestrained by the hand that now gripped his shoulder.

"Oh God!" Tears and sweat, he kissed them away and she still continued to cry until he withdrew from her, lying on his side and wrapping his powerful arms around her equally powerful body, drawing her close in the nearest thing to affection he had shown since this all began. "Oh God, John-!"

"Hush." He kissed her face, her forehead, eyelids and cheeks, letting his lips linger a moment before touching hers ever so slightly. "Remember, my Helen, _we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep_. So sleep, my heart."

She awoke the next morning to sunlight streaming in over the paintings on the walls with their gilded frames, the soft carpeting, the spacious room. She awoke to an empty bed, and a single, red apple on the pillow beside her.


End file.
